The Corrections

by Jonathan Franzen
United States
Born on 17 Aug 1959
Novelist/Essayist

Quotes

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"You see a person with kids", she said, "and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you�re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things".

The Corrections
Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.

The Corrections
The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

The Corrections
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact. The family was the house's soul.

The Corrections
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

The Corrections
Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

The Corrections
Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

The Corrections
What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

The Corrections
Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

The Corrections
And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

The Corrections
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The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays